06

The city asphalt felt like hostile territory beneath the tires of the taxi Audrey had boarded with trembling hands. Following her encounter with Marcus Thorne, a visceral, masochistic impulse had driven her to give an instruction that defied all logic.

"The Sullivan mansion, please," she had whispered, lowering her gaze so the driver wouldn't catch the shimmering onset of her tears.

As the vehicle advanced down the tree-lined avenues leading to the city's most exclusive district, Audrey felt time folding back on itself. The knot in her throat—the one she had tried to dissolve in the chilling mists of Inverness—returned with suffocating force. She had spent five years without exchanging a single word with Eliot and Olivia Sullivan. Severing ties had been a necessary amputation to protect her twins' safety, but the pain of absence remained an open wound that festered in moments of weakness.

When the cab finally halted before the imposing wrought-iron gates, Audrey didn't get out. She sat frozen behind the glass, staring at the stone facade she once called home. The place seemed to have aged with an aristocratic sadness; the gardens she used to tend were now overgrown, perhaps reflecting the financial ruin Alessandro Di' Giovanni had rescued them from at the cost of her life.

"Are you getting out, ma'am?" the driver asked, breaking the spell of melancholy.

Audrey gazed at the grand entrance. A part of her yearned to run inside, embrace her mother, and beg for forgiveness, but the memory of the chilling indifference with which they had traded her like a commodity froze her impulse. She couldn't risk her children's peace for a family that viewed her merely as an asset.

"No," she replied firmly, though her voice wavered. "Take me to the airport, please. I'd rather wait there."

The taxi made a U-turn, pulling her away from the ruins of her past. Audrey sank back into the seat, closing her eyes. She only wanted to reach the terminal, board the return flight to Scotland, and lose herself in her little ones' arms, far from the shadows of the Sullivans and, above all, far from Alessandro's electric presence.

Meanwhile, on the fortieth floor of the Di' Giovanni Corporation, the atmosphere was radically different. The air hummed with static electricity, a silent warning that the man ruling the empire was on the verge of erupting.

Alessandro stood motionless before his office window, his jaw clenched so tightly the muscles in his face looked carved from granite. He had just made the most irrational decision of his career: canceling his business trip to Dubai. Minutes earlier, he had bolted to the lobby only to watch a taxi speed away, robbing him of the chance to intercept the woman who had stolen his sleep for over eighteen hundred days.

His friend watched him from the leather sofa, a mix of bewilderment and barely contained curiosity written across his face. In all their years of friendship, Marcus had never seen Alessandro thrown off balance by anything short of a global financial collapse. Abandoning a multi-million-dollar negotiation for a personal matter was simply unheard of.

The silence stretched until Alessandro, irritated by his friend's scrutiny, swung around with a blazing glare.

"Spit out whatever you're thinking, Thorne," he snapped, his voice distilling a dangerous hostility.

Marcus raised his hands in an innocent gesture, though a crooked smile played on his lips.

"I didn't ask anything."

"You don't have to speak. You're dying of curiosity; it's written all over your face," he retorted, pacing toward his desk like a caged predator.

The blond let out a long sigh and leaned forward, dropping his bantering tone.

"Fine, I admit it. You've got me baffled. You just canceled the deal of the year over a woman who, as far as I knew, was just an outside consultant. Who is she really? Who is Audrey Sullivan?"

Alessandro fell silent for a second, balling his fists over the wood surface of his desk. The confession burned in his throat, but the crushing weight of his obsession was too much to carry alone.

"She's the woman I've been hunting this entire time," he finally confessed, his tone low and gravelly. "Audrey Sullivan is the daughter of the man who stripped everything from my grandfather—the one who was supposed to settle her family's debt with her own life."

Thorne frowned, trying to connect the puzzle pieces. He vaguely remembered the history of the conflict with the Sullivans, but he knew there was something deeper—something that had turned Alessandro into a dangerously obsessed man.

"It's her..." Marcus murmured, understanding dawning in his eyes. "The woman from the hotel night. The one who fled pregnant with your heirs."

The dark-haired man nodded with painful rigidity. For five years, his life had turned into a chessboard missing its queen. What began as a thirst for vengeance had morphed into an absolute fixation. Alessandro, the man who got everything in business, who never took no for an answer, had met a challenge he couldn't buy or subdue: Audrey's vanishing trail. The search had become a shadow following him into every meeting, every trip, growing heavier with each passing year.

"That woman made a fool of me. She left me hanging with a signed contract and walked away with my blood somewhere out in the world," Alessandro hissed, his eyes flashing with a mix of hatred and dark possessiveness. "I won't let her slip through my fingers again."

Thorne was about to probe further, eager to know what he intended to do if he actually found her, when two sharp raps at the door interrupted them. Dante, Alessandro's head of security and most trusted confidant, stepped inside. His expression was a mask of cold efficiency.

Dante approached his boss and, after a brief nod toward Marcus, leaned in to whisper something in his ear. Marcus strained to listen, catching only fragments of technical jargon. Yet Alessandro's reaction was instantaneous. He bolted upright with electrifying energy, his eyes blazing with terrifying determination.

"Are you sure?" he asked, his voice vibrating at a low pitch.

"Confirmed, sir," Dante answered with chilling efficiency. "The cab dropped her off at Terminal Four ten minutes ago. The flight bound for Inverness departs in exactly two hours."

Alessandro straightened his suit jacket with a calm that preceded a disaster. The frustration consuming him moments before morphed into lethal strategy. He had just enough time, he had the power, and finally, he had the exact location.

Would Audrey manage to escape once more before the claws of the past closed the circle around her, or was she about to discover the price of her freedom was far higher than she ever imagined?